Perth Voice Interactive

IF you have ever burned with rage about the behaviour of the fossil fuel corporations doing as little as they are forced to do and as much as they can get away with in the face of mounting atmospheric carbon pollution and global warming, then Juice is for you.

Tim Winton’s latest novel, a dystopian science fiction tale set in a Mad Max-style, burned-out future revolves around the use of extreme violence, but the carnage is directed against the environmental injustice that is being perpetrated today.

The narrative device is a reminiscence told in the first person in a dialogue between a prisoner and his guard.

While beginning in a settlement north of the Tropic of Capricorn on the WA coastline, the action takes place world-wide so the reader gets a taste of what our planet might degenerate into if meaningful action against climate change is not taken now. 

In the future that Winton glimpses, the summers are so unbearably hot that people must retreat annually into caverns to survive. 

In a nice Wintonean touch they puff on marijuana continuously to dull the boredom.

Each winter they emerge from their enforced hibernation to hurriedly grow their provisions for the next cycle of life underground. 

This is a world without petroleum, that infrastructure has collapsed. 

All energy comes from cobbled-together solar panels and wind generators with the electricity stored in batteries. 

Survival is always threatened by massive storms that sweep through.

In this precarious setting the narrator comes across information that the world was once not always like this; that it was once lush and hospitable. 

Not only was it once bountiful, but it had been deliberately destroyed by corrupt and greedy people.

With that jarring knowledge comes choices that throw him into a cycle of violence that is the moral landscape of the book. 

There are occasional digressions into theological matters such as the Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden.

Sweeping

All this is held together with Winton’s characteristic sweeping prose, which as always is a delight. 

Winton can occasionally just stop a reader in their tracks with a simile or a description of a landscape. 

His love for outback WA radiates and is inspirational.

Juice is a satisfying thriller. 

The action keeps coming and no doubt many people will spend their summer addictively turning its 500 pages, which will come to them as a Christmas present, while they suffer through what is predicted to be record-breaking heat. 

That, of course, is Winton’s intention: to use our consumerist conventions to make us think about climate change.

Winton has published around 30 books, so story telling comes easily to him and his Western Australian fan base is rock solid. 

However, there are aspects of this writing that bear criticism.

Winton specialises in emotionally wounded, troubled male characters, and Juice is narrated by one. 

So, the female characters that appear are on the periphery of the narrator’s vision and therefore the reader’s, escaping being fully realised. 

In Juice, women don’t express themselves as rounded individuals with developed personalities.

Their actions are described but their function is limited to cyphers for the male-centred plot to unfold.

Also, the beautiful language of the protagonist in this story is not that of a hard-bitten, dirt-poor survivalist who has grown up without formal schooling. 

It is Winton speaking through this character’s mouth.

With those caveats registered, Juice is a noteworthy book and deserves a wide readership. 

It is an urgent cultural intervention into what passes for the climate change debate in Australia, and about bloody time.

by BARRY HEALY